FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, victorious in national elections but wounded by a fall in support for her party and a sharp rise for the far right, faced the complex task Monday of cobbling together a government for her fourth and final term.
The Sunday vote left Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) well ahead of all other parties in the race for the German Parliament, known as the Bundestag.
But the party’s support fell well short of the mark it set four years ago, and her coalition partner, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), faced a similarly steep decline.
The SPD immediately announced it would not join Merkel for another term, leaving her with just one functional option for forming a new government: a never-before-tried three-way coalition among her conservatives, the socially liberal and pro-business Free Democrats and the Green Party.
With weeks of tough negotiations likely to come, Merkel must also reckon with the dramatic gains of the far-right, anti-Islam AfD, which placed third with 12.6 percent of the vote and is set to become the first far-right party in the Bundestag in more than half a century. The party’s vote total was nearly triple its 2013 result, and it matches the outer limit of its support in pre-election polls
The groundswell of support upended any notion that Europe’s largest economy and most important geo*political player is immune to the populist currents roiling other democracies across the West. It also revealed the depths of lingering resentment toward Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome more than a million asylum seekers amid the European refugee crisis.
Taken together, the outcome is likely to complicate Merkel’s ambitions for her final term, while giving the bombastic AfD a prominent platform to influence politics in a country where civility and consensus have long been prized.
“It’s a huge change in the political landscape,” said Hans Kundnani, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “It will change the nature of debate in the Bundestag.”
True to its combative reputation, the party wasted no time in vowing to use its voice in the Bundestag, the larger house in Parliament, to cause trouble for the government — including by investigating Merkel’s refugee-related decision-making
But the party will have to overcome fierce internal divisions if it wants to make good on its pledge. Those were laid bare Monday morning when one of the party’s most visible personalities, co-chairwoman Frauke Petry, announced she would not be joining the AfD’s caucus in Parliament. She abruptly left a press conference with other AfD members Monday without taking questions.
Despite the AfD’s gains, Sunday’s results represented at least a partial affirmation of Merkel’s emphasis on Germany’s stability and economic prosperity at a time of upheaval elsewhere around the globe. They clear the way for her to extend her 12-year stewardship to 16, which would tie the record for postwar Germany.
Merkel’s CDU, along with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, won 33 percent — down several points from what most pre-election polls had predicted, and 8.5 points lower than its result in 2013. The vote share was among the lowest ever for the party, which has governed Germany for most of the nation’s postwar history.
While promising to remain as chancellor, Merkel also acknowledged the “strong challenge” from the AfD and its voters.
“We want to win them back,” she said. “We want to address their fears and concerns.”
The SPD placed a distant second with 20.5 percent of the vote, a dismal result for Merkel’s coalition partner of the past four years.
“Taking in so many refugees split the nation, that has become clear,” SPD leader Martin Schulz told supporters. “We didn’t manage to convince a segment of our society that our country is strong enough to handle the task.”
Schulz said the party would not join another government, and would instead go into opposition to offer voters a clear alternative to the CDU for the next election.
The decision leaves Merkel to try to forge a so-called Jamaica coalition, a reference to the colors of the three parties that would take part: Merkel’s CDU, the Free Democrats and the Greens.
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
But that could be a tricky arrangement given the two junior parties’ differences on key economic and foreign policies. The Greens, in particular, said Sunday that they would put strict conditions on their participation.
“We don’t want to govern just to govern,” said Cem Özdemir, co-leader of the Greens.
Kundnani said the Greens — who have already had a run in government with the Social Democrats — would be reluctant to do a deal that could force them to sacrifice core principles.
he said.“This is going to be a very right-wing government one way or another,”
Still, there will be significant pressure on the parties to strike a deal. Without one, Germany could be forced to hold new elections, an outcome that the mainstream parties fear would only further strengthen the AfD.
Sunday’s vote continues a *Europe-wide trend toward fragmentation, as the country’s two biggest establishment parties lost support and the smaller parties gained. The Bundestag will now be crowded with six parties that span the ideological spectrum from far left to far right.
The result follows a relatively low-key campaign in which the major parties largely ducked the chance to challenge Merkel. Despite the lack of pre-election intrigue, turnout was higher than usual, with over three-quarters of Germany’s 61 million voters casting ballots from the Baltic Sea to the Alps.
Exit polls showed that many of the AfD’s voters were casting ballots for the first time, while supporters of other parties said they showed up to try to block the party.
“We have to counter the right-wing people,” said Abdessamad Mendoui, a 75-year-old who immigrated to Germany 55 years ago from Morocco, and who walked slowly on Sunday to his polling place in the western city of Frankfurt.
To Merkel’s backers, the election was a chance to endorse German stability at a historically fraught time.
“It doesn’t look good in the world. If you listen to that guy in America and also in the East with his atomic weapons, you get scared,” said Elida Baller, 84, referring to President Trump and Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.
But the AfD’s support was higher than many Germans had thought possible in a country where the memory of extreme-right-wing government is a source of profound national shame.
“For me, the AfD is a Nazi party,” Hannelore Weimann, 81, said after voting in Berlin. “I experienced World War II and I have seen the history, and I don’t understand how people can vote for a party like this.”
The party was founded in 2013 in protest over European bailouts for Greece, and that year it barely missed the 5 percent cutoff for making it into the Bundestag.
But its popularity has surged on the back of resistance to Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open the country’s borders to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing war, oppression and extreme poverty.
The party was especially strong in the former East Germany, winning 23 percent there — compared with just 11 percent in the west.
Jens Töpfer, 36, an engineer who cast one of his two ballots Sunday for the AfD, said he is afraid that Germany is being overrun by refugees. And that could bring dire consequences for the next generation, he said, pointing to his 2-year-old son.
“Refugees have a different culture that doesn’t fit in here,” he said. “They should go back where they came from and fight for their freedom and reconstruction.”
Germany’s other major parties were united in speaking out against the AfD, both before and after the vote. Schulz called the far-right party “the gravediggers of democracy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.d2e60131d25e
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
Russian meddling?
Germany is trending right. Merkels immigration open borders was a bad mistake all the way around
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
You are correct, but Germany didn't trend right far enough.
Liberals will never admit that the jihadi invasion is part and parcel of the immigration/"refugee" Trojan horse.
In Sweden they know they goofed but they are suppressing crime reports to hide the truth about "refugees".
Thank God we have Trump to keep these animals out.
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
I keep seeing the evidence that open borders don't work.
Europe is almost overrun with "migrants".
I think the backlash is coming, and the only reason it hasn't yet is that the jihadists and their chorus of useful idiots beat the rayciss drum incessantly.
Incessant droning eventually gets ignored.
they are mostly a drain on resources- some assimilate, many do not.
European countries used to have an individual flavor/character/history/culture -it's what makes Europe such an interesting continent
The EU and globalist have damaged that, and the nativists want it back
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
According to Japanese Ministry of Justice data, Japan accepted just 11 asylum seekers out of a record 5,000 applications, although Japanese officials say most of the asylum applicants were from other Asian countries and were already living in Japan.
I wonder if the globalist cheerleaders for unrestricted jihadi migration are calling Japan rayciss.
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
afd got 11% right? This is surprising i thought they wouldnt get anywhere near 10.
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
FUCK THE POLICE (09-25-2017)
tsuke (09-25-2017)
Fuck America. Fuck the virus of nationalism that is destroying the west. Afd should be banned and it's leaders executed in a second Nuremberg trial.
"Do not think that I came to bring peace... I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." - Matthew 10:34
tsuke (09-25-2017)
Bookmarks